Engineer Memoirs
go to Unit B. If you have a morning report every day and one unit lists him as departed
and the other unit does not list him as arrived or picked up, then he's not on the rolls.
In the morning report system, those things get corrected with time. If you looked back
30 days--that is, suppose on July 2, you asked what the strength of the Army is and it's
some number. Then on August lst, you asked what the strength was July lst.
You found a huge difference by the time all the corrections had flowed in because of
these problems of one unit having dropped a soldier and the other unit not having
picked him up. Thirty days later such mistakes disappeared because one or the other or
both units have sent in corrections.
This is just a slight insight into the kind of problems which occupied Resor. He was
very interested in this. MacNamara, of course, with his management style, wanted to
get all this right.
One of the amusing events that happened in the middle of all this was a squabble over
what size the Army should be--not what the size was, but what strength should be
authorized. MacNamara said that authorization should be controlled within plus-or-
minus 50 people. Here we were. We didn't know how many people there were to the
nearest ten thousand. Yet MacNamara was insisting that it all be controlled to 50. In
my opinion, this epitomizes his failure as the Secretary of Defense. He was worrying
about this type of thing, and he lost the war.
Q:
Should Stanley Resor have worried about counting from morning reports as the
Secretary of the Army?
A:
In my opinion, Resor was doing what he had to do because he worked for a Secretary
of Defense that was preoccupied with these things. Among the many reasons that we
lost the Vietnam War was that the leadership of the country--and I'm thinking of
President Johnson and Robert MacNamara, Secretary of Defense--knew very little
about war.
Imagine a war--General Bruce Palmer called it the 25 Years' War--a war that went
on for 25 years, and every year the budget was made up on the assumption that the war
would end on the last day of that year. They didn't want any bullets left over because
of all the waste after World War II from the surpluses. We didn't want to have that in
Vietnam. How do you think the waste after World War II compares with the waste of
Vietnam?
Here were guys worrying about these details. It was a paradox because MacNamara
would say over and over again, "We can afford whatever it takes to have a strong
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